Bon Jovi

For anyone still livin' on a prayer, the veteran pop rockers offer an LP of new material. The first song is surprisingly classic Jovi, with a ringing guitar line and a chorus that will stick in your head till the end of time. From there, Jon and co. run the gamut, offering party anthems, songs tailor-made for the commute home, and some stuff for when the lights are low.

The girls who grooved to Slippery When Wet back in 1986 have gotten married and bought
SUVs, but Bon Jovi have kept their arena anthems simple and sweaty -- so much so that
hating the New Jersey quartet seems silly at this point. Have a Nice Day, their ninth studio
album, is as reliable as it is contained: Acoustic ballads such as "Bells of Freedom" are
vaguely icky, but powerhouse anthems like "I Want to Be Loved" pack almost as... More >

Bon Jovi mean so little long or short term that it was only with this redolently entitled cheese bomb that I realized they hadn't actually broken up back in the fabled '90s. (Really--I took all their '00s albums for reunion one-shots, and couldn't figure out why the product kept coming in the three seconds I thought about it.) The commercial secret is as unchanging as Jon-Jon's mysteriously unwrinkled countenance--hard rock so inoffensive it's less Aerosmith than Air Supply. Not only is it impossible to tell whether the one called "Bells of Freedom" is pro- or anti-Bush, it's impossible to tell whether it's patriotic. A depressing argument for the existence of that intellectual fairy tale, the passive mass audience. (Grade - C+)